Home // James Jackson // nojacko.com

Welcome to NoJacko.com

This is the home of James David Jackson.

Information: This site is running on my own Content Management System that I am currently developing. As I develop the CMS, I also add more content and I will be giving the site a nice make over as soon as I can. Please contact me if you come across any issues on the site, thanks!

For more information about me and the site please take a look at my Hello World post.

My 22^nd Birthday Today (2009/06/28)

Happy Birth-anniversary (as my Dad always says) to me! I had a pretty nice weekend. Yesterday I chilled out at home playing Call of Duty and listening to Fightstar for most of the day. In the evening I went into Leicester with a bunch of my friends. Starting off at Soar Point and then making our way on to Redeemer were we spent most of the night. A good time was had by all. Today, my actual birth-anniversary, I had my family around for a chinese and some awesome chocolate and fudge birthday cake! So all in all my birthday weekend was a really nice.

Now I'm into my 23rd year on Earth and I hope this year will be a good one. I don't see any reason why it won't be. I've got plenty of things to look forward to including Neil and Rachel's wedding in Spring. And hopefully I'll be able to tick off a few thing from my list of things to do before I die. Cheers!

Kane the Rubbish Drummer (2009/06/20)

As mentioned in the Download Feastival 2009 post, I recorded two videos of my mate Kane drumming on bits of rubbish at Download. Here are the videos!

iPhone OS 3.0 and iPhone 3GS (2009/06/19)

The new iPhone OS 3.0 came out a few days ago and the new iPhone, iPhone 3GS (the S stands for Speed), came out today. I was thinking about upgrading to the 3GS untill I saw I'd have to pay the full £440.40 for the 16GB version or £538.30 for the 32GB verion. No subsidized mid-contract upgrade this time. Such a shame, I was hoping that it would be the same price for me as it is for new customers (£87.11-£274.23 depending on version and contract rate). If it had been I would have upgraded right away because EnviroFone are offering £180 for my iPhone and it wouldn't have cost me much, if anything at all. Oh well! I'm still very happy with the iPhone 3G and the combination of the new OS and Google Sync service has made it better.

iPhone OS 3.0
Well I upgraded the Operating System on my iPhone 3G on the 19th of June and I'm liking what I see. The main thing, for me, is MMS. Really MMS should have been in the iPhone from the start but it's here now (nice to see Apple doesn't forget customers after making the initial sale) and it works really nicely, exactly how I thought it would work.

The copy/paste functionallity is nice too. So far I've only used it to demostrate how it actually works but I can see plenty of uses for this, like copying a phone number from your contact into an email, text or something.

Search is another note worthy addition. Search on the iPhone searches pretty much the whole phone (calendar, contacts, apps, ...) and I like the way it works. I've found it's much easier to use search to find a contact than going into the contacts application.

The only other new feature that I might use is the voice memo app. I can imagine there's 100s of apps on the store that do this already, EverNote being the one I can remember, so I don't think it was really needed. Having said that it's very simple to use and if you just wanna make a quick voice memo it works a treat.

Apple claim something like 100+ new features have been added. But that's enough for now.

Unrelated to the new 3.0 software is Google Sync. I only found this recently but love it. It acts as an exchange server to sync your Gmail contacts and your Google Calendar. It's really good, although to be great it would need to work with your Gmail emails too. I'm sure Google are working on this and I'll be pleased when it comes!

Download Festival 2009 (2009/06/18)

Download was great! Saw loads of cool bands. My top 5 were:

Papa Roach
Slipknot
Fightstar
Chris Cornell
Journey (Don't stop believin'!)

I'm going to be posting a full review shortly but just don't have time to finish it now. Hopefully tomorrow but if no I'll get it done this weekend.

I also want to some post pictures however I didn't take a camera so I'm waiting on my friends to upload them to Facebook before I can post any. Come on guys! Well I can't push them really as I've not uploaded my video yet. It will be entitled "Kane the Rubbish Drummer" and that's all I'm going to give away for now. It's definately work watching!

Look out for the update in the next few days!

BustedTees.com Rock! (2009/06/10)

I ordered three tees from BustedTees and this morning they came. There was 2 packages for 3 tees. Looked a bit strange to me. So I opened them up and I found I got the same 3 tees TWICE!

As an honest guy, and knowing full well they wouldn't want to refund the postage cost of me returning one of the sets, I emailed them to let them know. And yes, they are letting me keep them as "back ups for when you wear through the 1st batch".

So that was a nice supprise.

Oh and The Sims 3 came today. I'll have a play when I get back from Download and post a review.

Red Faction Guerilla (2009/06/08)

Having got my PlayStation 3 back after 2 months being without I was geared up for a mega gaming session this weekend and that's what I did. I had ordered Red Faction Guerilla and it came on Saturday morning. I started playing it early afternoon on Saturday and I didn't stop until the early hours of Sunday. This game is so much fun! I love it!

It's a free-roaming/action/shooter game and all three areas have been executed awesomely. The map size is pretty big, although some areas of the map look like you can go there but can't, it's still big. The two main things I love about this game are the sledgehammer and the destruction. The sledgehammer is your basic tool/weapon and it can be use to kill or destroy. Running up to EDF troops and whacking them with the sledgehammer is priceless. Destruction: all the buildings and structures in Red Faction Guerilla can be leveled. I've never actually seen destruction in a game like this, it's beautiful. You can level a massive building within minutes or even seconds using any combination of vehicles, walkers, guns, explosives and your trusty sledgehammer. After charging through a building with a walker, my favourite method of destruction is setting a few remote charges and trying to destroy the building in one push of a button.

The single player has been so addictive that I've only been online with it for a couple of rounds. In those rounds I can see multiplayer is going to keep me entertained long after the single player game is over. I'll probably post more about the multiplayer mode when I've had a good play on it.

Guess what came in the post today? (2009/06/04)

First thing that came today was my box of 10 Montecristo No. 4 cigars. Woohoo. They'll be nice at Download.

Then a few hours later a currier came to take my broken PlayStation 3 and replace it with a refurbished one. Bring on the mega gaming session this weekend!

There's a little story behind the PS3. It had been broke for 2 months, it was 2 years old so out of warrenty. Sony wanted charge me £145 to replace it. Being a little broke I couldn't pay that so I had a look in the Sales of Goods Act and found out the retailer (GAME) should repair or replace it. So fast forward 1 & 1/2 months and 3 letters to GAME. Game took it to be repaired, came back last Friday and stopped working on the Sunday . So I rang them up on Tuesday (2 days ago). They wanted me to send it back again, get a gift card and go out and buy a preowned one. I didn't want that because mines an original 60GB model. So I convinced them to pay for the £145 for Sony to replace it. Within 48 hours I they took mine away and replaced it.

It's a great service by Sony really. GAME on that other hand tried to convince me the Sales of Goods Act was not what it was to try and get out of paying. But in the end they have agreed to refund me the £145 and it's cost me a few letters sent recorded delivery. I will be putting the letters i sent to GAME online soon so someone else might be helped.

Where I'll be this Summer (2009/06/03)

In a weeks time I'll be going to Download at Donnington Park. Really looking forward to it, will be great. After Download I'll be going to Silverstone Classic at Silverstone and then on the 1st and 2nd of August I'll be at Sonisphere at Knebworth House. The cool thing is that Sonisphere is being set up by my uncle who owns K2ours.

All these events should be great!!! I'll be posting pictures and my thoughts on each.

New CMS features and changes to nojacko.com (2009/05/31)

Over the last week or so I've been working some more on the CMS. The main factor contributing to this is that I'd told a friend (Matt) he could use it on his site. Last week he bought his domain name and wanted to get started. The main features that I've added are:

HTML Widgets
These are bits of html users can create with the WYSIWYG editor and then include into the left or right hand side of a page. You can see these in action to your right on this page (About Me).
Media Manager
Media Manager will now automatically create a thumbnail when you upload a JPEG, GIF or PNG image. Also, the simple ability to include a thumbnail into a page with a link to the original link already embeded.
Other tweaks and nice touches
Theres a lot more little features I've added just to make things smoother and more useable. Here's a quick list: better options when saving a page that isn't published, after a page saves the URL is shown, the list of pages now links to each page and even more that are too small to mention.

You can see the cms running here on www.nojacko.com and also on Matt's site www.mattcrane.co.uk. I've let him have full access to the skin, views and css so he has full controll of the site's look.

As for the next set of changes... top of the to-do list is mainly behind the scenes improvements. They shouldn't really take too long (fingers crossed). Afterwards it's going to be galleries or blogs and then some widgets for both of them.

Hello World! (2009/05/05)

Hello World. This is my first post for the new nojacko.com. I'm going to touch on a few of things:

who I am
about this website
it's reason for being
the blog

Who I Am
I am James Jackson and this is my personal website. That's all I shall say in this post about myself. If you want to know more check out the about page.

This Website
This site will be a place for me to blog, show off my work, collect useful links, test new stuff I'm working on and other things I've not thought off yet. This site has actually been around a few years now. It's not been kept up to date. The main reason being is it was all static html and a bit of a pain to update. So about 8 months ago (August/September 2008) I started working on creating a CMS. I've been working on it on and off since and in that time so much has changed and at one point I even rewrote the lot. All the time has actually worked out really well! Because I've been taking my time I've been able to think through everything before starting to implement it. The CMS so much better for this, as any project should be if you plan it well. At the moment the CMS is not for sale, but after it's been proven to work and new features are added it might be avalible to buy...

..back to the point. The site is now running on the above mentioned CMS meaning it's really easy for me to edit and update. So with the new easy of updating and a promise to myself to keep the site update it's looking good.

Reason
The original reason for this site was to have my own personal site. Before, I had only had websites trying to make a little money of the interweb. This site was to really to be about me, bring together all my sites and also be a site that wouldn't disappear off the face of the Earth like some of my other sites have. The name? nojacko was a name I thought of for playing games online. Jacko is a way to common nickname, so I came up with something more unique. I think it came from a friend of mine who would say "Nooooo Jacko" if I did something stupid at school. I was a bit silly at school so it was said a lot and the way he said it was always the same. So when I decided to think of a unique name it must have popped into my head. It wasn't being used by others and seemed alright to me... so I used it.

Blog
A quick note about this blog. The blog will be about anything and everything. Whatever I feel like really. Each post will be tagged and categorized, but until there are most posts I won't be listing the categories or tags. It'll look a bit plain with only 1 or 2 posts in each category/tag, and I haven't really finished the blogging system. You won't be able to comment on posts. I don't really think this is necessary for my site but if you do want to comment feel free to contact me.

Well that's it for my first post. Quite a bit longer than I originally thought it would be.

NoJacko.com